Sitting Pretty Read online

  ‘No, no, Pinot Grigio’s fine,’ I said, as brightly as I could. I didn’t want her going back down the ‘Why does Beth seem so distracted?’ route that I’d managed to head her off from this morning.

  ‘You do seem distracted today, Beth. I thought so this morning.’ Seemed I was in for a disappointment. ‘I suppose you must be missing Alex?’

  ‘Alex? Alex who?’ I wanted to say. I actually had been as distracted as Daisy thought today, but it was by the sudden arrival of Marvin Halliday. And in that distraction my runaway husband had, essentially, slipped out of my mind altogether for now. But of course I couldn’t actually say that to Daisy and Nick, so I mumbled, ‘Oh, you know how it is,’ ignoring the voice in my head that told me no, they, in fact, didn’t. Here were a happy couple who obviously enjoyed each other’s company, having a drink together to unwind at the end of their working weeks. They unwound, as they probably did most things, together. They couldn’t be expected to understand the version of Alex’s departure I’d given them. And they’d be even less likely to understand what had really happened.

  I noticed them giving me sympathetic looks. Blimey! It was bad enough when a female friend thought you needed sympathy, but when her boyfriend thought it too, things must look really bad. ‘Don’t you two worry about me.’ I pumped up the cheeriness level in my voice. ‘There was no point at all in me going to Dubai and twiddling my fingers in a hotel room until Alex could find us an apartment. I don’t have any work to go to there and I love working at Sitting Pretty, so this was the ideal thing.’

  How many times had I told that lie? I was getting a bit fed up with it and actually, having told one person the truth, I was itching to blurt it out to someone else. Or even to everybody and be done with it. What would they say if I came out with ‘Hey, you’ll never guess what that little shit of a husband of mine did to me?’ But if I handed in my notice next week, I still had at least a week to work with Daisy and I didn’t want any awkwardness. There was plenty of time to tell her the truth when she was giving me a lift to the station to catch my coach to London.

  The waiter brought the wine and poured a little into Nick’s glass for him to try. He swigged it back, said it was great, and waited for us all to have been served and the waiter to have walked away before saying, ‘I wish they wouldn’t do that. Why do they bother? It’s a wine bar, what they serve has to be good otherwise they’d lose all their customers.’

  Daisy rolled her eyes at me. I knew from our many little chats over lunchtime pizzas or morning cups of coffee that her boyfriend, who was a lovely guy and seemed very outgoing, was actually painfully shy and hated to be singled out for anything. ‘Never mind.’ She kissed his cheek. ‘And just think, if there was ever a disgruntled employee at the winery who put something in one of the bottles and we got it, you could save my life by having that first taste of it.’

  ‘That’ll be a great comfort to me while I’m writhing round on the floor in agony.’

  Nick grimaced at us both, then smiled as Daisy said, ‘Then I could save you by giving you the kiss of life …’

  ‘You’d risk giving me the kiss of life, knowing there might be poison on my lips that could kill you too?’

  ‘Of course I would, Nick. Any woman would for the man she loved.’ She looked at me as if expecting me to agree with her. ‘You’d do that for Alex, wouldn’t you, Beth?’

  Not bloody likely, was the first thought that entered my head. Just a few short weeks ago I would have. Now I thought I would just tip the rest of the bottle down his throat and clamp his lips shut with my fingers for good measure. But of course I couldn’t say that, so I came up with a rather lame, ‘Oh I don’t know, I’m useless in a crisis. I probably wouldn’t think of it until it was too late. Cheers.’

  We clinked glasses and spent an hour or so chatting about work and gossiping about our Russian co-workers like three fishwives. Nick was completely on our wavelength in a way Alex had never been. It suddenly occurred to me just how many couples’ nights I’d missed out on because Alex had refused to make any effort to fit in with them.

  Daisy and Nick were going somewhere to eat, but I turned down their invitation to join them, thinking they should be left to enjoy the rest of their Friday evening without me playing gooseberry. So after I’d switched to orange juice and they’d polished off a second bottle, I paid my share of the bill and drove Harriet carefully, and even more slowly than I usually did, through the country lanes back to Netley Parva.

  It was a relief to see Marvin on his own in the front lounge through the open curtains as I drove past before parking down the little lane at the side of the church. I wondered if he’d done that on purpose to let me know. Walking back across the dark village green and up the front path, I rang the doorbell – which was a first, but as Eleanor at the shop knew Marvin was here, then the whole village probably did too, so I thought it would look more normal if I behaved like any old visitor popping round on a Friday night.

  ‘Hey, Beth! Come on in.’ Marvin ushered me inside. ‘Have you eaten yet? I wasn’t sure what to do about dinner. I got your message – which I’ve deleted so Henry can’t come across it by accident – but you didn’t say if you were eating while you were out or not. I was about to order a pizza from that place in Netley Magna.’

  ‘Pizzicatos?’ My eyes must have lit up. Their pizzas were good – much better than the place in Wintertown which we always ended up ordering from at work just because it was nearby and quick. That and the fact that Davina had opened an account with them.

  ‘Yes, here you are.’ He handed me the menu, which I would be willing to bet was the first delivery menu ever to cross the threshold of this cottage and not end up straight in the recycling bin. ‘I was thinking of a medium meat lovers’ feast and cheesy garlic bread. So we could make that a large or you could choose another medium of what you want.’

  ‘No, the meat lovers’ feast is just fine by me, thanks,’ I agreed. ‘But don’t add any extra garlic bread for me, I won’t be able to manage it.’ I wouldn’t even have been able to finish a medium on my own – I never had. Usually I just had a small pizza with a side salad – so I would probably just have a couple of slices and Marvin could pig out with the rest of it.

  ‘There’s some white wine and beer in the fridge – I didn’t know what you liked. Help yourself,’ Marvin said, picking up the phone and dialling the number. So I did just that. It was Chardonnay, not my favourite, but it had been nice of him to think of it. ‘It’ll be about half an hour,’ he told me.’ There’s nothing worth watching on TV. Do you want to have a look through the DVDs and find something to watch? Nothing soppy though, eh.’

  Soppy was the last thing I wanted, so we both agreed on a comedy. The choices in Henry Halliday’s DVD collection were rather limited as he seemed to prefer detective series and historical documentaries. If I wanted to learn all about the fall of the Roman Empire I was in the right place, but as far as comedies went there was a choice of Father Ted, Fawlty Towers, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Yes Minister, and Yes, Prime Minister. And yes, they were all in alphabetical order.

  ‘Father Ted!’ we both shouted at the same time.

  We were watching the episode where they enter a lookalike competition and all three of them dress up as Elvis when the pizza arrived forty-five minutes later. I had a vision of twitching net curtains from one end of the village to the other, like a row of falling dominoes – a pizza delivery motorbike turning up at Henry Halliday’s cottage? Whatever next?

  The pizza was so good I ate three slices, while Marvin demolished the rest of it with no problem at all. I noticed he hadn’t ordered garlic bread after all, unless they’d forgotten to deliver it.

  ‘Did they forget your garlic bread?’

  ‘Oh, I changed my mind,’ he said, ‘as you weren’t going to be having any. I didn’t want to be unsociable and breathe garlic all over you.’

  I couldn’t imagine that would have been a problem
– we weren’t going to be getting that close – and if he had any plans in that direction he was going to find himself going to bed disappointed. And very much alone, unless Talisker decided to ditch the spare room for the master bedroom.

  It was probably silly of me to even think it – he hardly seemed the type of man who needed to jump on an unsuspecting woman whether she wanted him to or not – but Marvin’s comment about the garlic made me ever so slightly uneasy. There wasn’t a lock on the spare room door so when I went upstairs to get ready for bed, I put the dressing table stool up against it so the door would bang into it if it was opened. Then I thought how ridiculous I was being and took it away again. Who did I think I was, Gisele Bündchen? After the way Alex had left me, I suspected I more in common with Father Ted’s Mrs Doyle.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  It took me much longer than normal to get to sleep that night. My brain wouldn’t let me relax until I’d heard Marvin come up the stairs, go along the landing to his brother’s bedroom, and open and shut the door. Then my ears started straining to hear him moving about. Then they strained themselves even further, listening out for the sound of silence after he’d got into bed. Even then my mind wouldn’t let sleep come. Sometimes my imagination was a pain in the backside.

  In the morning, I was awoken again by a knock on my bedroom door. Still needing sleep, I desperately wanted to ignore it but as I heard the door handle turn, I suddenly found myself wide awake.

  ‘I don’t know, Beth,’ Marvin repeated yesterday’s manoeuvres with the mug of coffee, milk, and sugar bowl, ‘you’re not very good at this taking it in turns to make the coffee, are you?’

  I hadn’t realised I was supposed to be. And if I had, I would have got dressed before doing it, I thought, as I noticed that this morning he’d invited himself into my room wearing only a T-shirt and boxer shorts. He had very hairy legs.

  ‘How long do you think it’ll take you to get ready? Quick shower, bit of toast – what, about half an hour?’ He started to head for the door. ‘Then we can feed those cats of yours on the way.’

  Damn! I thought, as he left the room, closing the door behind him. I’d briefly managed to forget that he was supposed to be taking me to the Isle of Wight today. All I wanted to do was curl up under the covers and go back to sleep, but I had half an hour to get up and get ready, and if I didn’t want him coming back in, I’d better get moving.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  ‘Aren’t we going from Southampton?’ I asked an hour later, after giving firstly Bella and then Anthony and Cleopatra the quickest visits ever. I’d promised them all that I would stay longer and play with them properly next time – Bella gave me a baleful, disapproving look that made me think she’d be straight on the phone to her owner to complain and demand that she ask for a refund on the grounds of dereliction of duty. Tony gave the impression of feeling very hard done by and kept looking at his toys and then at me as if he couldn’t quite believe how cruel and neglectful I was being. Cleo didn’t seem bothered at all, as if she had better things to do anyway.

  We took the fork that went towards Lyndhurst and Lymington, rather than the one for Southampton. The one and only time I’d been to the island was by Red Funnel ferry from Southampton to Cowes, or was it East Cowes? It had been a cold day then too, and I’d been pretty sure we were about the only people on board who hadn’t been on their way to visit relatives or friends staying at her Majesty’s pleasure in Parkhurst.

  ‘Southampton?’ Marvin glanced briefly at me before turning his attention back to the road and, of course, the ponies who might or might not take it in to their heads to wander in to it at any time. ‘Lizzy’s in Lymington. We’re going to Yarmouth.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I mumbled, feeling a bit daft. This Lizzy couldn’t be his girlfriend then, otherwise he’d have stayed with her last night rather than coming to his brother’s place. Then he wouldn’t have had to drive over this morning. And my imagination wouldn’t have kept me awake by grabbing hold of a couple of twos and making nine hundred and seventy-five over a silly comment about garlic breath.

  Marvin was wearing a dark-blue, baggy sweatshirt and scruffy, well-worn jeans which looked like they’d had years’ worth of some kind of dark oil – engine oil, probably – soaked into them, washed out, and soaked in again. They looked like the same clothes he’d been wearing when he turned up in the early hours of yesterday morning. They weren’t, however, because those seemed to have gone into the washing machine first thing this morning, along with another set of the same. He must live in scruffy, well-worn, oil-marinated jeans and dark-blue sweatshirts. And there was me thinking my wardrobe lacked variety. I only wished I’d known that he was going to put a wash on so I could have popped a few things in, too. The launderette in Wintertown was a pretty dismal place to spend an hour or so in the company of one or two others who, for whatever reason didn’t have access to a washing machine, each of us pretending not to be watching anyone else’s underwear go round and round and round. On second thoughts though, maybe it was just as well.

  By the time we reached Lymington it was starting to drizzle ever so slightly and I was wondering if this outing had been quite such a good idea after all. Lovely as it was to be doing something different – hell, anything different – with my weekend, I could have been eating lunch in a warm café, wiping a space in the condensation steaming up the windows to watch other people get drizzled on, before going along to a warm, dry cinema and munching popcorn while slipping into somebody else’s life and the dramas it held, for a couple of hours.

  We headed for the old town quay which seemed to be full of all sorts and sizes of boats. It looked pretty, even if you weren’t a boat-y type of person. There were three swans, floating regally about between the various vessels, as if they were the harbour inspectors giving them all the once-over. Two were spotlessly white and one was a bit muddy looking, as if it had been in the wash with a stray brown sock – obviously the trainee or work experience harbour inspector. There were brown ducks splashing along behind them too – so it could have been Bring Your Ducklings To Work Day. What was the word for a group of ducks? It was something amusing I seemed to remember – paddling? A paddling of ducks?

  ‘You go and have a wander if you like,’ Marvin told me. ‘I’ve got to see someone. I’ll meet you back here in half an hour.’

  So I went and had a wander. There was a quaint little cobbled street meandering away from the quay. I walked towards it, checking the time on my watch. As I passed a ticket booth for Puffin Cruises I picked up a leaflet and scanned it. Apart from the ferry service to the island, there were half hour scenic river cruises and a lunchtime boat that allowed you three hours in Yarmouth – I wondered if that was the one we were going on. Actually, that sounded really nice and it only took half an hour to get there. Then I noticed that the timings on it were for the summer. I couldn’t see anything about November. Still, Marvin and this Lizzy must know what times the boats were. It sounded as if they did this sort of thing all the time.

  Folding up the leaflet and putting it in my pocket, I carried on towards the cobbles. There were little cafés and restaurants, and a collection of little boutique shops, gift shops, a sweet shop. A few of them had one or two tasteful and pretty decorations in their windows that could have been for Christmas but weren’t necessarily so, and none of them were playing any kind of tacky Christmas music. As the narrow road bent to the left, it started to go uphill. I didn’t go all the way up to the top – those cobbles looked like they could be slippery when wet, which they would be soon, so I just peered in the windows of the lovely little shops, imagining one day having another proper home to put nice things in again.

  That made me wonder what Alex was doing. It certainly wouldn’t be drizzly where he was. Would he be having lunch now? Would there be a canteen in his office or would he go to a café? I’d sometimes made him a packed lunch when he was here, but it wasn’t something he would ever do for himself. If I
could make him a packed lunch right now I’d put egg sandwiches in it. He had a thing about egg sandwiches. He used to love them as a child until his mum had made him some for a school trip once. She forgot to put the boiled eggs in the fridge to cool, so they got that grey sulphurous edge round the yolks, but she must have been in a hurry and mashed them together anyway and when he opened them up at lunchtime they stank the place out and nobody would sit anywhere near him for the rest of the trip. Yes, I think I’d make him a special Mama Petropoulos egg sandwich. And I’d vacuum pack it to keep the smell contained and ready for that blast from the bowels of hell smell when he opened it.

  Feeling the ghost of a smile on my lips, I made my way back down to the quay. There was a sign for mackerelling trips I hadn’t noticed on the way up. Couldn’t say I fancied that much. I wondered if the mackerel got thrown back after they’d been caught, or if the people took them home and gutted and cooked them. No, I didn’t fancy that at all.

  It occurred to me that maybe I should get three coffees from the little coffee shop. If the trip was only half an hour there might not be anything on board, but I didn’t know if Marvin’s girlfriend would want coffee or tea, or how she took either of them, so in the end I didn’t bother. We could always get something to warm ourselves up once we got to the island.

  Marvin was waiting for me, alone, when I got back to where I’d left him. I was about to ask him if Lizzy was on her way when he asked, ‘Are you ready for boarding?’

  ‘Boarding?’ I looked around us, puzzled. ‘But the ferry doesn’t go from here, does it?’

  ‘Ferry? What ferry?’ Marvin looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. ‘We’re not going by ferry. We’re taking Lizzy.’

  I looked towards where his head was indicating, at a small to medium sized – in comparison to all the others around it – rather old and scruffy-looking motor yacht. At least I presumed that was what it was, not having any interest in boat-y things. The name on the side suddenly caught my eye – Tin Lizzy. We weren’t seriously going to sail this thing to the Isle of Wight, were we? It looked like a hand-me-down toy boat that some child would float on Wintertown Park lake for five minutes before it started letting in water and sank. I looked at him, trying to form the question without making myself sound too stupid. After all, I’d thought Lizzy was a girl.